Josh Brolin to play Marvel supervillain Thanos.

Josh Brolin will play the villain Thanos in "Guardians of the Galaxy," as well as in the third Avengers movie (and possibly the second), according to Variety.

Right -- they haven't made the second "Avengers" yet. Which doesn't necessarily mean there's no good reason not to start getting excited about the third one.

DC missed its chance to cast Brolin as the new Batman, in favor of Ben "Baahhtman" Affleck. He's had to work in somebody's superhero franchise, eventually.

Thanos -- who appeared in a post-credits scene in "The Avengers" -- is an ancient godlike being (go figure) from Thor's neighborhood, who wants to impress Death (really?) by killing lots of people all over the place. Thanos is also (go figure, again) really good at villainous monologues, according to the website.

I love villainous monologues.

Thanos is also after all the "infinity gems," the all-powerful objects such as the Tesseract from "The Avengers." So he's like a universal, evil guy really into scavenger hunts.

"Guardians of the Galaxy" hits theaters Aug. 1 and stars, along with Brolin, Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana and Bradley Cooper.